Dregs of Yore

The more esoteric a crowd gets, the more often the defense of the humanities collapses into a kind of self-congratulation: a language of “critical thinking,” “interrogating power structures,” and “deconstructing systemic injustice”, offered as though these were private virtues that set one apart from the “unenlightened ones”. It is not enough to comment on the mere inadequacy of such a framing, much less its deceptiveness. It suggests that the humanities justify themselves only by deepening the inner life of those who study them (a claim that enthusiasts of any discipline could make), when their more urgent function lies elsewhere: in the maintenance of a shared world. To understand this, it helps to notice what has happened to the idea of public service. There was a time when the work of holding society together — of interpreting norms, transmitting memory, arbitrating meaning — was distributed across institutions like family, religion, and community. These were not always just or ben...

The phrase “conservative feminism” sounds, at first hearing, like an argument conducted in bad faith.  Feminism, after all, emerged historically as a critique of inherited structures: of law, of custom, of the quiet tyrannies embedded in the ordinary. Conservatism, by contrast, is often understood as a disposition towards preservation, a suspicion of rupture, a preference for continuity over experiment. To yoke the two together is to ask whether one can simultaneously resist and revere the same civilisational inheritance. Yet the tension is not, upon closer inspection, as irreconcilable as it appears. For neither feminism nor conservatism is a monolith. Each contains within it rival genealogies, internal dissents, and philosophical ambiguities. If feminism can be disentangled from its more revolutionary impulses, and conservatism from its more complacent accommodations to hierarchy, a space, however narrow or contested, does begin to open up. At its most basic, feminism is a claim ...